Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) has formally announced that she will run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by a retiring Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in 2016. She will challenge California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was the first to declare her candidacy earlier this year, and had already begun raising millions of dollars in the hopes of clearing the field of rivals.
To put it in Democrats’ favorite terms: how many people will die needlessly because Democrats in California refused to spend the money to make our roads safe?
President Barack Obama has defended the impending nuclear deal with Iran by promising Americans that there will be automatic “snap-back” provisions to restore sanctions automatically if Iran cheats on its obligations: “If Iran violates the deal, sanctions can be snapped back into place,” he said in April. On Wednesday, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told Bloomberg News that there would be no such provisions: “There can be no automaticity, none whatsoever,” he said.
Following the Obama administration’s craven presentation of America’s–largely imaginary–human rights shortcomings to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) Monday, the member states took their turns to add to the criticism. In many cases, the countries piling on were dictatorships that murder and persecute their own citizens with absolute impunity.
The National Security Council (NSC) is meant to serve as “the President’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and cabinet officials. Increasingly, it is a repository for radicals whose ideas are too extreme for public scrutiny, and who would never pass congressional muster. The latest case is the NSC’s hosting last month of a Palestinian-American teenager, Tariq Khdeir, who was beaten by Israeli police in 2014.
I believe in free trade. I think the evidence is compelling that the free flow of goods and services makes Americans better off and is a fundamental national interest. It also reduces global poverty and increases the potential for liberty worldwide. The costs to jobs in some industries can be partly addressed by job growth in others. So I am on board, in theory, for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other deals, including with the EU. But I don’t think Obama has earned the trust for “fast-track.”
The Obama administration has, once again, complained to the United Nations about alleged American human rights violations–and boasted about liberal policies like Obamacare as the solution. The State Department report, released Monday as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council, reads less like an accounting of human rights issues and more like the platform of the Democratic Party–and invites the world to judge America harshly.
The New York Times has published an extensive article documenting the fear felt by many Jewish students on American college campuses because of the large, well-funded, and aggressive anti-Israel movement.
In an official statement, Starbucks has announced that it will stop bottling water in drought-stricken California and will move production–and jobs–to Pennsylvania to produce the Ethos brand of water that it sells in thousands of coffee shops.
By now, it is beyond cliché to point out the many ways in which President Barack Obama abandons his former positions when they become politically inconvenient. His reversal on free trade, however, stands out because it is the one reversal that faces significant opposition from within his own party, and specifically from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Recently Obama said that “Elizabeth is a politician just like everybody else.” That would, presumably, include Obama himself.
Arriving naked at a final exam is one of the most common nightmares for students, according to Psychology Today. At the University of California San Diego, however, the naked final exam is a requirement for a class in the visual arts
On the most basic level, Israel seems to have the formula of statecraft right, prioritizing national security and economic growth above all else.
JERUSALEM, Israel — Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon told legal scholars at a conference on the laws of war that terrorists who failed to destroy Israel were resorting to new methods, which included “using our law against us.”
JERUSALEM, Israel — Former Israeli soldiers blasted a new report by a radical left-wing group called “Breaking the Silence” that alleges the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) maintained a policy of “indiscriminate fire” during last summer’s Gaza war.
JERUSALEM, Israel — “Only in Israel can you win an election and lose it the next day,” intoned the announced on Israel’s Army Radio on Tuesday morning, over audio of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory speech from the elections in March. On Monday, Netanyahu’s fragile coalition-building effort suffered a dangerous setback with the sudden departure of Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, which leaves Netanyahu with a slim and unstable 61-59 majority in the Knesset.
JERUSALEM, Israel — The future of tech investing is housed–barely–in a stone spice warehouse on the Hebron Road in Jerusalem. There are, I am told, bullet holes in the walls, from the days when the building faced the boundary with Jordan. On the day I visit, it sounds like a war zone–a battle of drills and hammers, fire alarms and telephones, as the company expands into neighboring space. Only two years old, OurCrowd is revolutionizing startup funding–and growing rapidly.
Penelope Trunk, an entrepreneur and “geek feminist” who blogs about careers and business, has speculated openly that the sudden death of Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, was a suicide.
JERUSALEM, Israel — Security officers shot and wounded a 35-year-old Arab man who attempted to carry out a terror attack at a light rail station steps away from where international legal experts had gathered for a conference on terrorism.
JERUSALEM, Israel — Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told a legal conference that the Western media have encouraged terrorists to use human shields in war by focusing attention on civilian casualties in such a way that Western military forces were effectively deterred from responding to terrorist attacks. He suggested that legal doctrines might need to be adjusted in order to remove the operational advantage human shields provide terrorists.
JERUSALEM, Israel — As police scrambled to contain a possible terror attack on a Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas, legal scholars and activists gathered in Jerusalem for a conference on terrorism and its implications for the laws of war.
JERUSALEM, Israel — Thousands of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel continued their nationwide protest against police brutality on Sunday evening, shutting down a major highway for three hours and demonstrating in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. As in protests last Thursday in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv protest turned violent, and 27 law enforcement officers were injured, according to Ynet. The protests were sparked by video of two policemen beating an Ethiopian soldier in uniform.
Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, died suddenly on Friday evening, according to a Facebook post by his brother Robert. Goldberg passed away while on vacation with his family. The cause of death was not disclosed.
TEL AVIV, Jerusalem — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas this weekend at his headquarters in Ramallah, and declared that Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is not a “terrorist.” Carter said that he would not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because it was a “waste of time,” and that Meshaal not only wanted a “peace process,” but would commit to recognizing Israel as part of a deal brokered by Saudi Arabia.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Secretary of State John Kerry appeared on Israeli television over the weekend, telling seven-million-plus Israelis that critics of the emerging Iran deal were guilty of “hysteria.” Israel, which sits a short missile flight away from potentially nuclear-armed Iranian warheads, and which has seen Iranian soldiers along its borders with Syria and Lebanon, has loudly protested the negotiations that the Obama administration has pursued with the Iranian regime.
TEL AVIV — May 1 is still a significant day in Israel. There are marches through the center of Tel Aviv celebrating May Day and the solidarity of the international working class. (The international working class has shown considerably less interest in solidarity with Israel, but never mind.) Today, Israel is more “start-up nation” than workers’ paradise, known more for the entrepreneurship of its Internet millionaires than for the power of its labor unions or the collectivism of the kibbutz.
